To
many listeners, Spohr's name is more familiar than his music:
musicologists acknowledge him as a prominent lesser contemporary
of Beethoven, while a passing mention in The Mikado brings
him regularly to the attention of Savoyards. More recently,
his scores have received sporadic bouts of recorded attention.
His clarinet concertos show off the solo instrument effectively,
but the themes are resolutely unmemorable; record producers
who pair a Spohr concerto with the Mozart A major are asking
for trouble. His chamber music is genuinely appealing and
well-wrought, but the composer's predilection for larger
instrumental groupings - septets, octets, nonets - suggests
ambitions beyond the scope, or expectations, of the chamber
form.

The
two symphonies in the present program - I don't know whether
this is a one-off, or the beginning of a planned cycle -
prove listenable and engaging. Spohr's craftsmanship is mostly
impeccable: his structures, with a single glaring exception,
are clear and compact; his logical development sections hold
the listener's interest. His most obvious shortcoming is
a tendency to festoon recapitulations with little scales
and other figurations, perhaps in an effort to vary them.
If Beethoven's shadow occasionally falls over the music,
this is hardly bad, and was probably to be expected at the
time - it was only the twentieth century, after all, that
would make a sort of fetish of unmoored, unadulterated originality.

The
majestic tutti chords that launch the E-flat symphony
yield to quieter textures decorated by woodwind and bass
scales, in a slow introduction that suggests the spirit,
if not the sound, of Haydn. The Allegro proper arrives
with a pleasant lyrical theme; surprisingly, it's the second
theme, also lyrical, that has the sharper contours, with
crisp dotted rhythms. The expression, particularly in the
softer passages, may bring Schumann to mind, although that
composer, of course, hadn't yet begun composing.

A
dignified cello theme over steady "walking" pizzicati begins
the Larghetto con moto, which maintains a Classical
restraint even when more turbulent material arrives over
pulsing triplets. The Scherzo, again, is rather lyrical,
punctuated with sharp tutti outbursts; there's a nice
moment towards the end where Spohr reinforces the cadences
by shifting briefly from triple to duple scansion. Here,
it's the Trio's unequivocal shift into the minor that provides
the needed contrast. The Finale's attractive opening
subject occasionally achieves real delicacy, while its second
group draws more character from its little scalar "tails" than
from the theme itself.

The
second symphony makes less strong an immediate impression.
In the first movement, the casting of busy, agitated material
in D minor markedly anticipates Schumann's dramatic symphony
in that key. Unfortunately, Spohr makes a rare structural
miscalculation, capping a concise sonata form with a coda
that goes on too long and runs out of steam. The Larghetto is
based on a sweet if square chorale, with ominous trumpets
and pounding tympani briefly disturbing the mood. Things
pick up with the Scherzo, which blends forward impulse
-- the marking is Presto -- with firm rhythmic grounding,
while the legato Trio, with its broader rhythmic spring,
opens into triumphant climaxes. The unclouded Finale is
chipper and infectious.

The
Grand Concert Overture isn't much of an asset. Its sense
of scale is off, with the heavy, portentous gestures at the
start suggesting both a longer introduction and a bigger
piece than we actually get. The principal theme, with its
prevalent short articulations, comes off as rather "cutesy," though
its further elaboration is dead serious. The second theme
offers minimal contrast to the first, being built from similarly
brief motifs, but it's a bit more shapely in, again, a distinctly
Schumannesque vein. There's a nice moment at the start of
the development where the woodwinds carry the music to a
distant key, and the climax at 5:40 is surprisingly exuberant
coming from such short-winded material.

Howard
Shelley draws impressive sounds from the Orchestra della
Svizzera Italiana, keeping the basses light and springy,
drawing solid, compact chording in tutti. The violins
don't have much time or tone to spare in some of the faster
writing - especially in the D minor symphony - but the playing
is clean and unified. Shelley also understands this elusive
early-Romantic style, and leads sympathetic performances;
in the E-flat symphony, the rhythmic scansion of the first
movement's main theme isn't immediately clear, but that may
well be the composer's fault.

Hyperion's
favored ambience produces a braver resonance than I would
prefer. In this instance, however, it doesn't obscure important
detail, perhaps because Spohr's textures aren't all that
busy to begin with, so there's not much important detail
to lose. The program is sensibly arranged with the overture
preceding the two symphonies.

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